Woodfire cooking may be the go-to option when camping, but according to a recent study, people who do so in their homes may be at risk of having significant lung damage.
The reason? Breathing in the toxic pollutants from the smoke that wood cooking creates. That’s according to a study presented at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting.
Wood is considered biomass, which is a plant or animal-based renewable energy. Biomass-produced pollutants are a significant contributor to the approximately 4 million annual deaths from illnesses linked to household air pollution, according to a news release from RSNA.
“It is important to detect, understand and reverse the early alterations that develop in response to chronic exposures to biomass fuel emissions,” study co-author Abhilash Kizhakke Puliyakote, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher from the University of California San Diego School of Medicine.
Focusing on 23 people in Thanjavur, India, researchers investigated how cookstove pollutants influenced them when cooking with liquefied petroleum gas or wood biomass.
They used two tools to measure the impact. One was traditional tests, such as spirometry, which measures airflow in the lungs. Researchers conducted this test after measuring the concentrations of pollutants in the homes. Another test was advanced CT scanning, which made quantitative measurements. In one case, researchers took a scan when a person inhaled and another after they exhaled. Then, they saw how the lungs were working by measuring the difference between the images.
People who cooked with wood biomass were found to be exposed to higher concentrations of pollutants and bacterial endotoxins than those who used liquefied petroleum gas. They also had a condition associated with lung diseases, which is a noticeably higher level of air trapping in their lungs.
“Air trapping happens when a part of the lung is unable to efficiently exchange air with the environment, so the next time you breathe in, you’re not getting enough oxygen into that region and eliminating carbon dioxide,” Kizhakke Puliyakote said. “That part of the lung has impaired gas exchange.”
Using the CT scans allowed researchers to discover information on how smoke impacted the lungs, revealing it was to a greater extent than traditional tests showed.
“The extent of damage from biomass fuels is not really well captured by traditional tests,” Kizhakke Puliyakote said. “You need more advanced, sensitive techniques like CT imaging. The key advantage to using imaging is that it’s so sensitive that you can detect subtle, regional changes before they progress to full blown disease, and you can follow disease progression over short periods of time.”
Additionally, a subset of biomass users had more sensitivity than had been seen in other studies of tobacco smokers, Kizhakke Puliyakote said.
This isn’t the first time a study has reviewed the risk of wood fire burning.
In 2014, researchers from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the U.K. and Ohio State University found that about 600 million to 800 million families worldwide are at a heightened risk of illnesses including pneumonia, asthma and lung cancer based on the household air pollution created from burning wood indoors to cook.
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